[...]if the collection could have been named (in English) "Brandenburg Concertivitis", a person referencing would generally repeat this stupidity. "Concertivitis" sounds like some kind of made up disease of the orchestra pit used to sell strange tinctures to concert hall buildin...

But it's milk before cereal/tea/jam on a scone. Is milk before cereal an actual thing? Some people must have very large cereal bowls or very splashy floors. Some flake-form cereals can be predisposed to acts of lactic treachery: you pour the milk on a flake whose geometry sends a portion of the cal...

emojii (emojen/emeji?) It's a Japanese loanword, so "emoji" is both the singular and the plural form. English doesn't (exactly) work that way. When we "borrow" a word*, we may or may not borrow its pluralization rules as well. Thus "radiuses" and "radii" are ...

These days the problem already starts with different operating systems / programs having different image sets for emojis, where a message sent as a friendly smile might arrive looking creepy on another OS. Which hopefully isn't relevant for professional communication... HEH, and indeed for some mig...

Justin Lardinois wrote:Title text: What are all these less-than signs? What's an HREF? Look, we know you live in a fancy futuristic tech world, but not all of us have upgraded to the latest from Sun Microsystems.

No "Sent from my Sun Microsystems" signature?

An email from a brighter timeline wrote:-Sent from my Sun UltraSPARC IX

People say that here in California we don't have any seasons, but that's not true at all! We have four seasons just like everywhere else: Sunny, Hot, Flooding, and On Fire. Maybe it's because I'm in Northern California, but my version of that joke is, "Spring, Summer, Indian Summer, Cold Spell...

The telescope's astronomers proposed to name the black hole Pōwehi, meaning "embellished dark source of unending creation" in the Hawaiian language. What terrible calamities befell you, what horrible darkness fills your history, for that to be conveyed in three syllables ? English "G...

We need anti-social occasions. A-party where people stay apart-y. Maybe that's why Quiplash is so fun? HEH, 'reminds me a friend's birthday party I went to where everyone quietly read books and enjoyed party snacks. There was a little chatting (including several incidents where I had to ask permiss...

We'll be sending better stuff soon ... https://interestingengineering.com/nonprofit-wants-to-send-wikipedia-archive-to-the-moon-by-2020 It's like we're drunk and spoiling for a fight. "Here is our location, these are our weaknesses, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" This...

I vaguely recall some sci-fi show explaining that the "space noises" heard therein are artificially generated by one's own ship so as to provide auditory information about one's surroundings. The ship is just scanning stuff with light, but it can tell how that stuff is vibrating through t...

Title text: Terms I'm going to start using: The Large Dipper, great potatoes, the Big Hadron Collider, and Large Orphan Annie. My personal choice for future use: "Great Hadron Collider!" That is permitted, but only if you use it as a swear word. "Great Hadron Collider, that driver sh...

He just can't give up on the Horizontal vs. Vertical thing, can he? He does seem to be having great fun with it, yes. I'm just glad he's not on Rectangular vs. Polar. Or arguably worse, time domain vs. frequency domain. Last time he touched near that can of hornets something weird happened to a cat.

Chips contain plenty of oxide, though. The wafer-thin slices of hilariously pure silicon crystal are very commonly doped with its oxide in order to provide the p-n and n-p junctions that make useful diodes and transistors happen. So at the very least, they certainly contain sand. Are you sure? This...

Silicon dioxide has no "ish" about it, that's straight up what most of most stones are made of. It's not what computer chips are made of, though. That would be highly pure silicon, and silicon is a metalloid, not a rock. Then all of the jokes about computers being made out of sand fall ap...

A block is missing from the Integration half: "Consult Gradstheyn & Ryzhik". I know, I know, its a 'book' and thus totally uncool. Even though it is also available as a CD. No, it's not an audio CD, although, come to think of it, an audio CD of G&R would be excellent for evening l...

HeHEhEehe, you think integration is bad? Wait until you encounter differential equations, A.K.A. forensic integration. You start with a horrible crime scene of related rates, and try an absurd cookbook of techniques including polynomial roots and too much application of Euler's theorem and leaps of ...

The humidifier will need a place for dry ice or something else for cooling so the humid air will form a fog that hugs the floor, or other "launch" surface. If you use some sort of refrigeration system, you can even dump the excess heat into the water reservoir to make it evaporate more ea...

Counterpoint: "u ppl" Apparently American youth are only too lazy to type, not to speak aloud? Not just the youth, but a veritable vortex of creatures I used to call adults when I was younger. It disturbs me intensely that so many of the adults have both taken to rejecting science and rea...

Neat, 'glad they finally fixed that three years ago. Unfortunately, I've a G4S with Lollipop and no support for anything later (not even Marshmallow, so no charge-only connection type for me). So, phone too old and also not Apple. 'Droid should get on that, though, if they've not already. (In which...

I've absolutely zero idea why in the blazes mobile keypads don't have arrow keys (at the very least left/right) -- it is a complete monstrosity to try to get the cursor between a specific pair of characters on a phone. Tapping nearby and arrowing over for terminal approach would work great, but... ...

A trivial QoL feature would be, when you hover over any formatting toggle toolbar button, to highlight all occurrences within the document body. Dim+desaturate everything else, give it a significant background colour or something. Too bad touchscreens don't have a proper hover feature, and today's ...

Is OSI Jenga a thing? I'd say as far as reality, i.e. the Internet, is concerned, layers 4 and 5 correspond to TCP, layer 6 is SSL/TLS, and layer 7 is HTTP. Of course SSL/TLS is a beast of a protocol with quite a bit of structure of its own. Aren't SSL and friends supposed to be layer in 4? I mean,...

I find what really weakens the argument for atomic structure being described is this bit here: And I summoned the very lowest ... and said: Let ... come forth hard, and [it] came forth hard from the invisible ... And [it] came forth, hard, heavy, and very red. ... and [it] came ... forth, very great...

I was completely oblivious to this NPM left-pad thing. Sounds exciting! https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/ ... Strange, that such a simple piece of code wouldn't be a component of the base libraries or something. And it's disappointing that they just restored it, without f...

Took a minute for it to click that it's because the model lasted all the way from 1932 to 2008. The funky shapes of the s, p, and d orbitals were indeed all in textbooks well before 2008. I think the year of "2008" is thrown in there simply because that's when fivethirtyeight.com rose to ...

I recently learned that there's a vaguely hat-shaped enemy in the Legend of Zelda series called "peahats", and decided to find out if any crafty people out there had made an actual hat based on one. It was then that I learned that search engines have no idea what to do with the string &qu...

Ages ago, you could put plus and minus signs in front of words to guarantee they'd be in the results, or not in the results. Now, that behaves badly, unless you get google to do it for you by scrolling to the bottom, picking "advanced search", and putting the words on the appropriate line...

Even during a field reversal there might be a residual field from the inner core that gives us some protection. This article a NatGeo speculates that core could be a "permanent magnet" of sorts ... like one giant crystal lattice with all the magnetic domains aligned: https://www.nationalg...